Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> [...] After all, users want to access the content that
> actually exists, not the content that /should/ be there.
And no-one is suggesting stopping them, since what actually
exists is either written in HTML <= 4.01 or in tag soup.
But the remit of this group is /not/ to define how extant
HTML should be processed, but rather to define how the
next iteration of HTML should be written (and processed).
And in so doing, the group should be informed by the
errors of the past. The received wisdom at the time
that the HTML 4.01 spec. was published was that the
language should be primarily semantic rather than
presentational : it is my belief (and that of some other
members of this list) that the WHATWG failed to
ascribe sufficient weight to that wisdom, and instead
reverted to an earlier presentational paradigm, with
its concomitant loss of precision and accessibility.
Philip Taylor